Not scholarship girls: Recomposing the lives of adult working-class women through literacy narratives.
Item
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Title
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Not scholarship girls: Recomposing the lives of adult working-class women through literacy narratives.
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Identifier
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AAI9830704
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identifier
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9830704
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Creator
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Ferretti, Eileen Manning.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Ira Shor
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Date
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1998
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Rhetoric and Composition | Literature, English | Education, Language and Literature
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines the classroom experience of a group of paraprofessional women who were students in my freshman composition class at Kingsborough Community College in the fall of 1992 as they made the transition from vocational skill-based classes to the liberal arts curriculum. Through the lens of the women's semester-long classroom narratives and my teaching journal, I offer an account of our negotiations and dialogues as these adult women students codeveloped a critical curriculum with me. These written records also illuminate the resistance I encountered in my attempts to reposition these students from workers who attend college for narrow technical knowledge (and pay raises) to student intellectuals who aspire to a liberal arts degree.;Essentially, this dissertation considers the effectiveness of critical pedagogy which offers an alternative model to the uncritical curriculum and depressed aspirations learned by these women in their vocational courses. Focusing on the ongoing struggle of resistance and accommodation between myself and my students, this "pedagogy narrative" closely examines my classroom interactions with them throughout the semester--which suggest that class, gender, age, occupation, and education construct these women as silent facilitators of other people's lives in the home, the school workplace, and on the college campus. Correlative with my thesis on silent facilitators is a secondary thesis on the need for expansion of the literacy narrative genre now emergent in composition and rhetoric. Literacy narrative offer accounts of assimilation into academic culture from the perspective of working-class academics, illuminating the conflicts encountered by students from working-class backgrounds. Because they were written from the perspective of "Scholarship Boys and Girls," who came to college young, unmarried, and childless, the literacy narratives lack the perspective of adult women encountering campus culture later in life. Thus, the dual goal of this dissertation is one that fosters inclusiveness in literacy narratives and questions the skills-based pedagogy offered to these adult women students.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
